


The Way the Wind

by Culumacilinte



Category: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead - Stoppard
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-10-28
Updated: 2009-10-28
Packaged: 2017-10-15 02:55:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/156309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Culumacilinte/pseuds/Culumacilinte
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Moebius strip: n. A mathematical object which is a two dimensional sheet with one surface.  Continuous, with no beginning or end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Way the Wind

_The scene opens._

 _A graveyard, in a grey dawn.  There is the faintest stripe of pink on the horizon.  Two Elizabethans, ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN, sit at the edge of an open grave, each staring off in different directions at nothing in particular.  ROSENCRANTZ’s legs swing idly, almost like a child’s, while GUILDENSTERN has his bent up before him- a tense, inward-turning posture._   
_  
_

_After some moments, ROSENCRANTZ turns to his companion.  Hopefully._   
_  
_

ROS: Coin toss?

GUIL: _(tired)_ We haven’t got any coins.

ROS: Of course we have!  I’ve got my purse right- _  
_

 _He pats at his belt, seeking for a coinpurse which, it becomes clear after a moment, is not there.  He frowns._

ROS: My purse has gone missing.

GUIL: I know, the gravediggers took it.  Mine as well.

ROS: _(with some confusion)_ How do you know that?

GUIL: They did take it right off my body; would have been fairly difficult to miss.

ROS: But you were dead!  How can you be expected to notice things like that when you’re busy being dead?

GUIL: I’m still dead.

ROS: Are you?

GUIL: Well, I died.  Logic would have it that I am, in fact, dead.

ROS: Ah, but logic doesn’t apply to this situation; merely by virtue of the fact that we’re sitting here having this conversation, we’ve already transgressed the laws of physics and biology, never mind logic. _  
_

 _GUILDENSTERN digs a stray stone from the loose earth beside him, turning it over in his hands, and idly flips it, as he might a coin._

GUIL: So you’re suggesting that there is no logic to this whatever?

ROS: It would seem not.

GUIL: Impossible.  _(pause)_ A syllogism.  The world is nothing without man to see it- the phenomenon vs. the noumenon.  It is as we perceive it, nothing more or less.  _Esse est percipi_ ; to be is to be perceived.  _I_ perceive myself as existing in a logical world.  Ergo, at least to me, there must be some logic that applies to us, and the world around us.  Discuss.

ROS: I’d really rather not. _  
_

 _GUILDENSTERN is, for a moment, taken aback.  It is as though he cannot remember ROSENCRANTZ ever having refused him before.  After a moment, he nods._

GUIL: Very well. _  
_

 _Time passes.  How much time is not important, only that it passes.  ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN may do as they wish; they may get up, if they feel like it, skipping rocks over the grass or examining a headstone, watching the horizon; all that matters is that eventually they end up at an open grave once more.   Time slips, rushes and crawls and meanders around them, until finally it fades into the present moment.  It is the only moment which could possibly have resulted from the passage of that particular time, and when ROSENCRANTZ speaks, it is as he always would have._

ROS: How long have we been dead? _  
_

 _All that build up; it feels rather anticlimactic._

GUIL: What?

ROS: Dead.  Do you know how long we’ve been dead?

GUIL: _(after a pause_ ) No.  Some time, I expect.  Why?

ROS: It just occurred to me...

GUIL: Be praised!  The dead flesh, it lives, the synapses fire! _  
_

 _ROSENCRANTZ doesn’t seem to notice the words, or the sarcasm behind them.  He’s caught up in his own thought._

ROS: We’re dead, we know that much.

GUIL: That much at least is certain, yes.

ROS: We’re dead.  And we’ve been sitting in this graveyard for, as you say, some time.  I would even go so far as to say that in that time, we have moved.  This _(firmly, he pats the ground by his thigh)_ is not our grave.

GUIL: _(distracted)_ Graves.

ROS: What?

GUIL: Graves.  In the plural.  Our _graves_.  We wouldn’t have been buried together.

ROS: Why not?

GUIL: _(getting suddenly angry)_ We _are_ two people.  _I_ am R- Gui- I am Guildenstern, and you are Rosencrantz, we at least deserve the small autonomy of having our own graves!

ROS: ...I wouldn’t mind being buried with you.

GUIL: _(snapping)_ What?

ROS: I- well, I wouldn’t mind.  It’s like being on boats, isn’t it? _  
_

 _GUILDENSTERN doesn’t answer, just glares stonily into the grave that is not theirs’.  ROSENCRANTZ watches him hesitantly, looking from his face to the section of earth that is the subject of his study. Finally, elaborating-_

ROS: I didn’t mind being on a boat with you.  I mean, I know we’ve decided that death isn’t a boat, but taking the situation hypothetically- it wasn’t as bad as if I’d been on a boat by myself; I can’t imagine being on a boat by myself.  At least we had someone to talk to.

GUIL: Can’t talk when you’re dead, though.

ROS: I thought we were dead.

GUIL: Ah.  So we are.  I’d forgotten.

ROS: It’s strangely easy to forget, really.  It’s not much different from being alive, seems like.  Though there is a distinct lack of momentum. _  
_

 _A long pause.  They both seem to be contemplating something._   
_  
_

_Simultaneously, they speak._

ROS: D’you want a coin-

GUIL: I get the feeling we’re- _  
_

 _And with the same synchronicity with which they started, they pause.  Eventually-_

GUIL: -repeating ourselves.

ROS: _(quietly, anguished)_ We were sent for.

GUIL: Do you ever get the sensation that you’re missing something?

ROS: _(as if out of the mists of memory)_ A voice calling our names in a certain dawn.  A grey morning.  ‘Hey you!  Wake up!  Get out of there!’  Knocking on the lid.

GUIL: _(he is still obviously following his own train of thought)_   A kind of dramatic irony, a continual missing of the obvious out of the corners of our eyes, while _they_ know.  They can see the big picture.  Some cosmic pattern must exist, but all we can see is the domino right in front of us.  We knock it over by accident, maybe, and there’s no knowing what might result, because we can’t follow the pattern to predict it.  Causality is null. _  
_

 _As he says this, he’s begun to trace shapes and lines in the soft grave-loam with the tip of one finger.  His movement grows faster and more frantic, frustrated, until abruptly he stops, sinking his fingers into the dirt, getting a grip on a clot of it.  He contemplates it, crumbling it slowly and meditatively._

GUIL: Not that I expect any of it matters anymore.

ROS: _(picking up the thought)_ Seeing as we’re dead. _  
_

 _ROSENCRANTZ stacks rocks.  GUILDENSTERN stares into the middle distance.  There is a wind, if only a very faint one._

ROS: Do you suppose he’s dead?

GUIL: Who?

ROS: Hamlet.

GUIL: _(with great conviction)_ Doesn’t matter.

ROS: _(of course, no, he can do this)_ Seeing as we’re dead.

GUIL: Exactly.

ROS: Speaking of... _  
_

 _A Look from GUILDENSTERN.  It’s the kind of look that clearly has long practise, and by virtue of that alone has earned its capital letter._

ROS: Shouldn’t we be... I don’t know, moving on or something?

GUIL: I assume you’re speaking metaphysically.

ROS: Well, you know- great white light, Nirvana, St. Peter at the Pearly Gates.  I’d even settle for limbo!  Maybe I wasn’t good enough for Heaven; that’s fine.  But I do think we ought to be going _somewhere_.  I’ve done my show; I deserve a better curtain call than hanging about some old graveyard for the rest of eternity.

GUIL: We never were much good at knowing where we’re going, though, were we?

ROS: No, we weren’t.  Aren’t.

GUIL: Won’t be.

ROS: What?

GUIL: Nothing. _  
_

 _It is, perhaps, still dawn.  Perhaps not.  Around them are graves, and new dirt, and soft, pink light.  A sound on the air that could be a flute.  Neither of them hears it._

 _Finis._


End file.
